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Boxee: A New Competitor For MythTV?

08-01-2008, 08:30 AM

Phoronix: Boxee: A New Competitor For MythTV?

For years MythTV has been regarded as the best media center application for the Linux platform and is extremely popular with HTPC enthusiasts. MythTV is open-source and serves as a digital video recorder with support for reading TV listings and it supports a variety of TV tuners. In addition, through various modules the functionality of MythTV can be extended to be an online photo gallery manager, serve as a music player, RSS newsreader, fetch weather forecasts, and provide quite a bit of other functionality. However, MythTV now has a new competitor and that is Boxee. Boxee is a "social media center" that is based upon the Xbox Media Center (XBMC) with versions for Linux, Windows, and MacOS X. What the Boxee developers have added, however, is a social media aspect to media playback. Whenever you are watching something through Boxee, it will record that information and share it with your friends using Boxee and the user also has the ability to recommend the media they are listening to or watching with their friends. Oh yes, it is also open-source.

Comment

I use MythTV quite a lot. It's the only way we watch TV in this household. While I'm sure Boxee is very nice, it doesn't appear to have the TV functionality that MythTV is really all about. All those extra features are really just that - extras. I don't currently use any of that stuff. If Boxee adds DVB TV functionality in the future, then I'll be checking it out!

I think Boxee has a long ways to go before MythTV starts to feel threatened. About the only thing I saw on the brief peruse of the Boxee site that MythTV genuinely lacks is the social aspect. I think integration with online video services may be a bit weak/difficult in MythTV too, but someone will eventually scratch that itch as a usable plugin.

Far more likely would be a MythTV plugin for Boxee. MythTV does the heavy lifting and Boxee acts as the frontend. However, there is already one slick in-development frontend for MythTV called Gloss, and there was discussion amongst the Elisa devs about using MythTV this way too. Both of those use a GL toolkit (Clutter and Pigment) for slick looking interfaces.

Comment

i think the title of the post may be a bit misleading. boxee does not try to replace MythTV, it is an alternative to Apple TV and Microsoft Media Center.

we built boxee because we were spending less and less time with broadcast TV and more and more time downloading and streaming music and video (we may build a plug-in for MythTV down the road. right now the focus is to turn Linux machines into a real alternative to Apple TV).

avner [at] boxee d0t tv

Comment

As someone who has been using MythTV for quite some time and been using XBMC since it was started and XBMP before the fork I can say that this is a good thing. I'm not sure about the social aspect of it though.

MythTV's functionality is good. MythWeb is awesome. But the mythfrontend interface sucks and so does playing music, video, and looking at pictures. XBMC has the best interface ever, hands down. With XBMC you can browse samba shares. With MythTV, it puts everything into a database and you need to keep refreshing every time you add a file to a directory...very lame. Also, setting up music and video queues in XBMC is awesome, you can go and edit them, move things around....awesome for parties.

I remember once I wanted to watch a football game that wasn't broadcast in my area. I found some p2p internet tv link for it and I was able to watch it in Windows run under VirtualBox on Linux. The first commercial break I got it playing natively on Linux with some command line tool that creates a stream which mplayer could play. The next commercial break I made a playlist file which linked to the stream and accessed it through Xbox Media Center on my HDTV. The point of this anecdote is that XBMC will play anything you throw at it. Simply amazing.

Last I played with the XBMC for Linux the audio was okay but the Video was lacking. I'm not sure about boxee, I think all they needed to do was keep MythTV the way it was and just replace mythfrontend with XBMC, but we'll see how this does.

Comment

As someone who has been using MythTV for quite some time and been using XBMC since it was started and XBMP before the fork I can say that this is a good thing. I'm not sure about the social aspect of it though.

MythTV's functionality is good. MythWeb is awesome. But the mythfrontend interface sucks and so does playing music, video, and looking at pictures. XBMC has the best interface ever, hands down. With XBMC you can browse samba shares. With MythTV, it puts everything into a database and you need to keep refreshing every time you add a file to a directory...very lame. Also, setting up music and video queues in XBMC is awesome, you can go and edit them, move things around....awesome for parties.

I remember once I wanted to watch a football game that wasn't broadcast in my area. I found some p2p internet tv link for it and I was able to watch it in Windows run under VirtualBox on Linux. The first commercial break I got it playing natively on Linux with some command line tool that creates a stream which mplayer could play. The next commercial break I made a playlist file which linked to the stream and accessed it through Xbox Media Center on my HDTV. The point of this anecdote is that XBMC will play anything you throw at it. Simply amazing.

Last I played with the XBMC for Linux the audio was okay but the Video was lacking. I'm not sure about boxee, I think all they needed to do was keep MythTV the way it was and just replace mythfrontend with XBMC, but we'll see how this does.

there is work being done in xbmc to serve as a frontend for mythtv, can't wait to see it in action